Taxiing tests
had shown
that the P2V-1 landing gear might not be able to handle the extreme
weight of the Turtle and that the landing gear struts could fail in
turns under such weight conditions. For that reason, the Turtle
was
only partially filled with fuel before it was positioned at the head
of the Pearce Aerodrome runway 27 at 7:00 a.m. on September 29th. Lined
up for take-off, all fueling was completed by 4:00 p.m. At
the same time, JATO packs were attached to the fuselage for the
jet-assisted take-off that would be needed to get the Turtle off the
ground.

The Turtle would take-off
with CDR Thomas D. Davies, the pilot in command, in the left seat and
CDR Eugene P. (Gene) Rankin, the copilot, in the right seat. In CDR
Rankin’s own words:

“Late
afternoon on the 29th,
the weather in southwestern Australia was beautiful. At 1800, the
two 2,300 hp Wright R-3350 engines were warming up. We were about to
commence a takeoff from a 6,000 foot runway at a gross weight of
85,561 pounds (the standard P2V was rated at 61,000 pounds), of
which about 50,000 pounds were gasoline. Sitting in the copilot’s
seat, I remember thinking about my wife, Virginia, and my three
daughters and asking myself, “What am I doing here in this
situation?” I took a deep breath and wished for the best, knowing
the takeoff would be the greatest risk of the entire flight.”

At 6:11p.m.,
CDR Tom
Davies stood on the brakes as the throttles were pushed forward to
maximum power. At the other end of the mile-long runway he could
make out the throng of news reporters and photographers.
Scattered
across the air base were hundreds of picnickers who came to witness
the spectacle of a JATO takeoff, and who stood when they heard the
sound of the engines being advanced to maximum power. Tom Davies
and
Gene Rankin scanned the engine instruments, which all showed normal
readings. Davies then released the brakes and the Turtle
reluctantly
began to roll. On this day, September 29,
1946, the Turtle was a veritable winged gas
tank that was more than thirteen tons over maximum gross weight.

The Turtle rumbled and
bounced on its tires that had been over-inflated to handle the heavy
load. Slowly it began to pick up speed. As each 1,000-foot
sign
went by, Rankin called out the speed and compared it to predicted
figures on a clipboard in his lap. With the second 1,000-foot sign
astern, the Turtle was committed. Davies could no longer stop the
aircraft in the runway remaining. It was then, quite literally, fly
or burn. When the quivering airspeed needle touched 87 knots,
Davies
punched a button wired to his yoke, and the four JATO bottles fired
from their attachment points aft on the fuselage. The crew could
hear the roar of the JATO bottles and feel their push. For a
critical twelve seconds, they provided the thrust of a third
engine. At about 4,500 feet down the runway, 115 knots was
reached on the
airspeed indicator, and Davies pulled the nose wheel off. There
were
some long seconds while the main landing gear continued to rumble on
the last of the runway. Then the rumbling stopped as the main
landing gear left the runway and the full load of the aircraft
shifted to the wings.

As soon as they were
certain that they were airborne, but still only an estimated five
feet above the ground, Davies called “gear up.” Rankin moved the
wheel-shaped actuator on the pedestal between the pilots to the up
position, and the wheels came up. Davies likely tapped the brakes to
stop the wheels from spinning, and the wheel-well doors closed just
as the JATO bottles burned out. Behind the pilots in the aft
fuselage, CDR Walt Reid kept his hand on the dump valve that could
quickly lighten their load in an emergency. LCDR Roy Tabeling, at
the radio position, kept all his switches off for now to prevent the
slightest spark.

The Turtle
had an
estimated 20 feet of altitude and 130 knots of airspeed when the JATO
bottles burned out. The JATO bottles were not just to give the
Turtle additional speed on take-off, but were intended to improve the
rate of climb immediately after lift-off. The Turtle barely cleared
the trees a quarter of a mile from the end of the runway. The
field
elevation of Pearce Aerodrome was about 500 feet, and the terrain to
the west sloped gradually down to the Indian Ocean about six miles
from the field. So, even without climbing, the Turtle was able to
gain height above the ground in the critical minutes after take-off.

Fortunately, the
emergency procedures for a failed engine had been well thought out,
but were never needed. At their takeoff weight, they estimated
that
they would be able to climb at a maximum of 400 feet per minute.
If
an engine failed and they put maximum power on the remaining engine,
they estimated that they would be forced to descend at 200 feet per
minute. Their planning indicated that if they could achieve 1,000
feet before an engine failure they would have about four minutes in
which to dump fuel to lighten the load and still be 200 feet in the
air to attempt a landing. With their built-in fuel dump system,
they
were confident that they were in good shape at any altitude above
1,000 feet because they could dump fuel fast enough to get down to a
comfortable single-engine operating weight before losing too much
altitude.

Departing the Aerodrome
boundary, the Turtle was over the waters of the Indian Ocean.
With
agonizing slowness, the altimeter and airspeed readings crept
upward. Walt Reid jettisoned the empty JATO bottles. The
Turtle was thought
to have a 125 knot stall speed with the flaps up at that weight.
When they had established a positive rate of climb, Gene Rankin
started bringing the flaps up in careful small increments. At 165
knots, with the flaps fully retracted, Tom Davies made his first
power reduction back to the maximum continuous setting. The sun
was
setting and the lights of the city were blinking on as the Turtle
circled back over Perth at 3,500 feet and headed out across the 1,800
miles of the central desert of Australia. On this record-breaking
night, one record had already been broken. Never before had two
engines carried so much weight into the air.

The
plan was to stay
fairly low… about 3,500 feet… for the first few hundred miles,
burning off fuel and reducing weight so the eventual climb to a
higher cruising altitude would require less gas. But the
southwest
wind, burbling and eddying across the hills northeast of Perth,
brought turbulence that shook and rattled the overloaded Turtle,
threatening the integrity of the wings themselves. Tom Davies
applied full power and took her up to 6,500 feet where the air was
smoother, reluctantly accepting the sacrifice of enough fuel to fly
an extra couple of hundred miles at the other end of the flight.

Alice Springs at
Australia’s center slid under the long wings at midnight and
Cooktown on the northeast coast at dawn. Then it was out over the
Coral Sea where, only a few years before, the Lexington (CV-2) and
Yorktown (CV-5) had put down the Japanese ship Shoho and turned back
Shokuku and Zuikcaku to win the first carrier battle in history and
prevent the cutoff and isolation of Australia. Within a day, the
Turtle would fly near the site of the Battle of Midway, which changed
the course of World War II in the Pacific only a month after the
Battle of the Coral Sea.

At noon on the second
day, the Turtle skirted the 10,000 foot peaks of southern New Guinea,
and in
mid-afternoon detoured around a mass of boiling thunderheads over
Bougainville in the Solomons. As the sun set for the second time
since takeoff, the Turtle’s crew headed out across the vast and
empty Pacific Ocean and began to establish an “at sea” routine.
They stood two-man four-hour watches, washing, shaving, and changing
to clean clothes each morning, and eating regular meals cooked on a
hot plate. Every two hours, a fresh pilot would enter the cockpit to
relieve whoever had been on watch the longest.

The two Wright 3350
engines ran smoothly; all the gauges and needles showed normal
conditions, and every hour another 200 or so miles of the Pacific
passed astern. The crew’s only worry was Joey the kangaroo, who
hunched unhappily in her crate and refused to eat or drink.

Dawn of the second
morning found the Turtle over Maro Reef, halfway between Midway
Island and Oahu in the long chain of Hawaiian Islands. The Turtle
only had one low-frequency radio, because most of the modern radio
equipment had been removed for weight reduction. Calls to Midway
and
Hawaii for weather updates were unsuccessful due to the distance.
Celestial navigation was showing that the Turtle was drifting
southward from their intended great circle route due to increased
northerly winds that were adding a headwind factor to their
track. Instead of correcting their course by turning more
northward, thereby
increasing their headwinds, CDR Davies stayed on heading and accepted
the fact that they would reach the west coast of the U.S. somewhere
in northern California rather than near Seattle as originally
planned. With the wing tip tanks empty, they were jettisoned over
the ocean as the Turtle eased up to 10,000 feet and later 12,000
feet. At noon, CDR Reid came up to the cockpit smiling. “Well,”
he reported, “the damned kangaroo has started to eat and drink
again. I guess she thinks we’re going to make it.”

The mission in which
Joey’s dim marsupial brain may or may not have acquired confidence
was no stunt, despite her presence. In the fall of 1946, the
increasingly hostile Soviet Union was pushing construction of a
submarine force nearly ten times larger than Adolph Hitler’s at the
start of WWII. Antisubmarine warfare was the Navy’s
responsibility, regardless of the views of the Army Air Forces.
The
Turtle was among the first of the P2V Neptune patrol planes designed
to counter the sub threat. Tom Davies’ orders derived straight
from the offices of Secretary of the Navy, James V. Forrestal, and
the Chief of Naval Operations, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. A
dramatic demonstration was needed to prove beyond question that the
new P2V patrol plane, its production representing a sizeable chunk of
the Navy’s skimpy peacetime budget, could do the job. With its
efficient design that gave it four-engine capability on two engines,
the mission would show the Neptune’s ability to cover the
transoceanic distances necessary to perform its ASW mission and
sea-surveillance functions. And, at a time when roles and
missions
were being developed to deliver nuclear weapons, it would not hurt a
bit to show that the Navy, too, had that capability.

So far, the flight had
gone pretty much according to plan. But now as the second full
day
in the air began to darken, the Pacific sky, gently clear and blue
for so long, turned rough and hostile. An hour before landfall,
great rolling knuckles of cloud punched out from the coastal
mountains. The Turtle bounced and vibrated. Ice crusted on
the
wings. Static blanked out radio transmissions and
reception. The
crew strapped down hard, turned up the red instrument lights and took
turns trying to tune the radio direction finder to a recognizable
station. It was midnight before Roy Tabeling succeeded in making
contact with the ground and requested an instrument clearance
eastward from California. They were 150 miles off the coast when
a
delightfully female voice reached up through the murk from Williams
Radio, 70 miles south of Red Bluff, California.

“I’m sorry” the
voice said. “I don’t seem to have a flight plan on you. What was
your departure point?”

“Perth, West
Australia.”

“No, I mean where
did
you take off from?”

“Perth, West
Australia.”

“Navy Zero Eight
Two,
you don’t understand. I mean what was your departure airport for
this leg of the flight?”

“Perth, West
Australia.”

“But, that’s
halfway
around the world!”

“No. Only about a
third. May we have that clearance?”

The Turtle had departed
Perth some thirty-nine hours earlier and had been out of radio
contact with anyone for the past twenty hours. That contact with
Williams Radio called off a world-wide alert for ships and stations
between Midway and the west coast to attempt contact with the Turtle
on all frequencies. With some difficulty due to reception, the
Turtle received an instrument clearance to proceed on airways from
Oakland to Sacramento and on to Salt Lake City at 13,000 feet.
The
weather report was discouraging. It indicated heavy turbulence,
thunderstorms, rain and icing conditions. As Gene Rankin wrote in
a
magazine article after the flight, “Had the Turtle been on the
ground at an airport at that point, the question might have arisen:
‘Is this trip necessary.’”

The Turtle reached the
west coast at 9:16 p.m. about thirty miles north of San
Francisco. Their estimated time of arrival, further north up the
coast, had been
9:00 p.m. They had taken off about forty hours earlier and had
covered 9,000 statute miles thus far. They had broken the distance
record by more than a thousand miles, and all of their remaining fuel
was in their wing tanks which showed about eight-tenths full.
Speculation among the pilots began as to how much further the Turtle
could fly before fuel exhaustion.

The static and
atmospherics closed in again as did the weird and wonderful
phenomenon of St. Elmo’s fire that added to the problems of the
Turtle’s crew. The two propellers whirled in rings of blue-white
light. Violet tongues licked up between the laminations of the
windshield. Eerie purple spokes protruded from the Neptune’s
nose. All those distracting effects would increase in brilliance
with an
accompanying rise in the volume of static on all radio frequencies
then suddenly discharge with a blinding flash and a thump only to
slowly rebuild. The Turtle’s oxygen system had been removed for
the flight, so the pilots were using portable walk-around oxygen
bottles to avoid anoxia at the high altitude.

The St. Elmo’s fire had
been annoying but not dangerous. It can be a heart-thumping
experience for those witnessing it for the first time. The
tachometer for the starboard engine had been acting up, but there was
no problem synchronizing the engines. The pilots kept the fuel
crossfeed switches, which connected both main tanks to both engines,
in the “off” position so that each engine was feeding from the
tank in that wing. Somewhere over Nevada, the starboard engine
began running rough and losing power. After scanning the gauges, the
pilots surmised that the carburetor intake was icing up and choking
itself. To correct that, the carburetor air preheating systems on
both engines were increased to full to clear out any carburetor ice
as quickly as possible. Very quickly, the warm air solved the
problem and the starboard engine ran smoothly again.

With
an engine running
rough, CDR Davies had to be thinking about their mission. The
Turtle
had broken the existing record, but was that good enough? It was
just
a matter of time before the AAF would launch another B-29 to take the
record up another notch. The Neptune was now light enough for single
engine flight, but how much farther could it go on one engine?
And
was it worth risking this first expensive aircraft of what should one
day be a family of hundreds for the sake of improving a distance
record?

Over
Nevada and Utah, the
weather was a serious factor. Freezing rain, snow and ice froze
on
the wings and fuselage, forcing the crew to increase power to stay
airborne. The aircraft picked up a headwind and an estimated
1,000
pounds of ice, which was problematic since the plane’s deicing and
anti-icing equipment had been removed as a weight-saving measure.
Three hours of higher power settings and increased fuel use at 13,000
feet were estimated to have cut about 500 miles of distance from the
flight.

After passing Salt Lake
City, the weather finally broke with the dawn of the Turtle’s third
day in the air. The Turtle was cleared to descend to 9,000
feet. All morning, CDR Davies tracked their progress eastward
over
Nebraska, Iowa, and the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. To the
north, the haze of Chicago was in sight. But now, not
surprisingly,
fuel was becoming a problem. The wingtip tanks had long ago been
emptied and jettisoned over the Pacific. The bomb bay tank, the
nose
tank and the big aft-fuselage tank were empty. The fuel gauges
for
the wing tanks were moving inexorably toward zero. CDR Davies and
his crew consulted, tapped the fuel gauges, calculated and
recalculated their remaining fuel, and cursed the gauges on which
one-eighth of an inch represented 200 gallons… more than an hour’s
flight. At noon they concluded they could not safely stretch the
flight all the way to Washington, D.C., and certainly not to the
island of Bermuda. CDR Davies chose the Naval Air Station at
Columbus, Ohio to be their final destination.

At quarter past one that
afternoon the runways and hangars of the Columbus airport were in
sight. The Turtle’s crew were cleaned-up and shaven and in
uniform. And the fuel gauges all read empty. With the
landing
checklist completed and wheels and flaps down, CDR Davies cranked the
Turtle around with a left turn onto final approach. As the plane
leveled out on final, the starboard engine popped, sputtered and
quit, but the port engine continued to provide power. At 400
feet,
both pilots realized the problem and reached for the fuel crossfeed
valves on the floor between their seats. In the banked turn, the
near empty starboard fuel tank had stopped feeding fuel into the
starboard engine. Within seconds, the starboard engine began
running
smoothly again and continued to run. The Turtle had been in no
danger, since they were light enough to operate on one engine, but it
would have been embarrassing to have an engine quit at that point.

At 1:28 p.m. on
October 1st, the
Neptune’s wheels once more touched the earth… touched it hard…
with tires that had been overinflated in Perth, 11,236 miles and 55
hours and 17 minutes from where they had taken off.

After a hastily called
press conference in Columbus, the crew was flown to NAS Anacostia in
Washington, D.C. by a Marine Corps Reserve R5D, where they were met
by their wives and the Secretary of the Navy. The crew were
grounded
by a flight surgeon upon landing in Columbus, so the Turtle was flown
to Anacostia by a flight crew flown in from NAS Patuxent River.
Before the day was over, the Turtle’s crew had been awarded
Distinguished Flying Crosses by Secretary Forrestal, and were
scheduled to meet with President Harry S. Truman the next day.
And
Joey, observably relieved to be back on solid earth, had been
installed in luxurious quarters in the Washington zoo.

The record established by
CDR Tom Davies and the crew of the Truculent Turtle stood not just
for a year or two or three, but for decades. The distance record
for
all aircraft was broken in 1962 by a jet-powered B-52. The
Truculent
Turtle’s record for piston/propeller driven aircraft was broken by
Burt Rutan’s Voyager, a carbon-fiber aircraft, which made its
historic around the world non-stop flight in 1986... more than 40
years after the Turtle landed in Columbus, Ohio.

After a well-earned
publicity tour, the Truculent Turtle was used by the Naval Air Test
Center, Patuxent River, Maryland as a flying test bed for advanced
avionics systems. Although assigned on paper to join VP-2 along
with
the other P2V-1’s that were first to come off the Lockheed
production line, it never did. The Truculent Turtle was retired
with
honors in 1953 and put on display in Norfolk, Virginia, where it was
repositioned in 1968 at the main gate of Naval Air Station Norfolk,
Virginia. In 1977, the Truculent Turtle was transported to the
National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida where it now
holds forth in a place of honor in the museum’s Hangar Bay One
display area.